Tracy Kidder won The 1982 National
Book Award for General Nonfiction for his book The
Soul of a New Machine.

It is impossible to list all the books that have impressed
me over nearly forty years of reading, never mind the
various admirable books that my mother read to me. But
here, off the top of my head, are some: The Collected
Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, Moby Dick, E.M.
Forster's Aspects of the Novel, The Tempest,
George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, The Collected
Poems of Emily Dickinson, Great Expectations, A.J.
Liebling's collected writings and also Joseph Mitchell's,
Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars, Saul Bellow's
Henderson the Rain King...One book that certainly
changed my life is Stuart Dybek's first collection of
short stories, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods.
I read many of the stories in manuscript twenty-five
years ago, when I was a student along with Mr. Dybek
at The Iowa Writers Workshop. The fact that a contemporary
was writing such powerful, distinctive fiction was both
encouraging and daunting. Mr. Dybek's stories made me
want to go on writing and to find my own path.